


healing, in three parts

by jugheadjones



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Baseball, M/M, Meatloaf, Post-Series 1, Recovery, Roadtrip, all four of them, post-shooting, the singer not the food, they finally take their gotdam road trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-15
Updated: 2017-09-15
Packaged: 2018-12-30 05:37:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12101916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jugheadjones/pseuds/jugheadjones
Summary: It’s that road trip they never went on - him and Fred, Jughead and Archie, doesn’t matter. By seven am they’re crammed into the vehicle - the shaggin’ wagon 2.0, if you will - and Jughead and Archie have split open the pack of red licorice that was supposed to be for after lunch.or, all the tiny ways FP and Fred try to get better.





	healing, in three parts

> _Some days it don’t come easy_
> 
> _And some days it don’t come hard_
> 
> _Some days it don’t come at all, and these are the days that never end._   
> 
> \- Meatloaf

 

He pitches an easy one, but Fred misses anyway, swinging the bat with a force that whistles through the spring air. The baseball hits the dirt and bounces.

“You don't have to impress me, Freddie,” says FP when Fred tosses the ball back. “Don't swing so hard.”

That one would have been strike number four, but not for lack of trying - Fred’s been muscling the bat like it’s tryouts for the goddamn National League, and the whole front of his shirt is dark with sweat. He frowns at FP and doesn’t say anything. Fred wants a hit.

He misses the next pitch too, though his form is flawless: the bat rotating perfectly in his grip as the swing whistles from one side of his body to the other. The strike flies behind him and rattles the metal of the batting cage.

He’s breathing hard when he crouches to get the ball, and FP wants to stop. Fred’s gaining weight back, slowly, and he looks healthier, more _whole_ than he has in the past few months, but the tiredness is draining it from him, his face shining white and drawn under the sheen of sweat.

“Let's pack up, okay, Fred?”

“One more.”

“Fred, your arms are gonna hurt,” protests FP, because Fred’s not supposed to be doing this kind of exertion without putting a cap on it, and they've been out here too long already. Fred just raises the bat, waits for another ball.

“C’mon FP,” he complains, bat wavering in his grip and beginning to orbit itself in circles, and with the plaintive note in his voice and the determined jut of his jaw FP sees him seventeen again, skinny and unathletic but doggedly determined, squinting into the mid-afternoon sun like a pro.

“You're gonna hurt your shoulders,”

“Come on, I'm getting old out here.”

FP decides it's quicker to give in. He grips the seams of the ball until they bite into his fingers (they feel like stitches on a wound, does anyone else ever think of that, or is that just him cause he’s lived on the southside his whole life, because everything’s been gore and nightmare in this town recently, the way people in big cities think of gunshots when they hear fireworks). FP hasn't played since high school - hasn’t done a lot of things since high school - but he used to be the best on the team. (How'd that Bruce Springsteen song go again?)

He spits on the ball because there's no rules out here, and Fred’s arms are shaking under the aluminum in a way that says this one’s going to be strike number six. He winds up at the plate, and lets it fly.

It's a good pitch, he thinks with satisfaction as it leaves his fingers, not perfect, not even great, but good. It sucked to throw a dud at the end of a long day, but this one feels true and clean and solid coming off his arm, and it's satisfying in a way that-

That’s as far as he gets in that thought, because Fred swings and his bat connects with a crack that sounds like the world breaking open.

They both just stand there and watch it, going, going, going, gone- a tiny white disc soaring up and up and up into the deep blue of the sky. Fred’s head is tilted up toward the sun and there’s a half-grin on his face like he can't quite believe it.

It’s so far away they don't even hear it come down, it just drops out of sight behind some trees and is gone. It had cleared the fence of the park.

“Well, fuck,” says FP, and turns back to him, Fred with his cat-got-the-canary grin, standing there at home plate with his chest heaving under his shirt and his home run off in another school district. “I guess you are getting better.”

 

> _I know you can save me, no one else can save me now but you. [..]_
> 
> _Maybe I'm lonely, that's all I'm qualified to be_
> 
> _That's just one and only, the one and only promise I can keep_

 

If you don't need it, thinks FP, burn it.

He’d encountered the sign in the exercise room of the Riverdale Corrections Facility, the paper so old it was turning yellow, the clear packing tape adhering it to the wall still tight despite the years. It had taken him a full two weeks to figure out they were talking about calories, not fire. Even then, he’d puzzled over it, wondering what the hell it was supposed to mean and why someone had bothered to print it and hang it up.

It was written in black block letters, an unnecessary exclamation point standing sentry at the end of the phrase. **IF YOU DON’T NEED IT, BURN IT!**

If they're talking about calories, _want_ would make more sense - if you don't _want_ to weigh three hundred pounds burn some of it off - but prison portions are small and no one’s hitting the gym because they're worried about the extra helping of dumplings they had last Tuesday. They're here because the boredom crawls into your skull like mice otherwise, or because they want to be the biggest and the nastiest and the scariest in the yard.

For some reason it had made him think of firewood - wasn't there a rule that you couldn't bring your own in and out of campsites? He hasn't been camping since he and Fred were in school, had always meant to take Jughead and Jellybean one day. He can imagine it being posted by an aggressive park ranger, exclamation mark and all - IF YOU DON’T NEED IT, BURN IT! What, burn before entering? Before leaving?

He tries not to think about it. About fresh air. About trees.

Especially about Fred.

Fred.

(If you don't need it - ) 

It was easy to imagine that curled yellow paper going up in smoke- he found himself picturing it every time he was in that room, even as he’d be subconsciously chanting its wisdom like a mantra, doing pull-ups on a gritty bar that was probably installed sometime around the industrial revolution and thinking _if you don't need it, burn it_ , wishing he had a lighter to set the damn thing off. If you don't **_need_ ** it- here he’d haul himself up so that his chin and most of his neck stretched above the bar, arms only shivering a little- **_burn it._ **

_Burn it_ , he’d think deliriously after miles on the exercise bike, _burn that motherfucker down. Burn, baby, burn. If you don't need it, just burn that shit ( **!** \- _the exclamation mark had always seemed sarcastic to him. _) If you don't fucking need it, grow a pair and burn it the fuck up._

He'd burned a lot of calories in that room- when he left his arms were thicker and his chest broader than before, (it's a sick joke, isn’t it, him getting bigger and Fred getting smaller and neither of them fitting right anywhere) but he still hadn’t figured out who put the sign up, nor had he held a contraband lighter to it for the irony. That doesn’t mean he hadn't thought about it. Jones men were made of fire.

Now he’s standing at one of the metal fire pits that dot Sunnyside Trailer Park like a disease, Jughead with him, emptying the last of his liquor stash into it without caring that they're all shattering at the bottom. Once it’s all down, he adds his flask - the metal one with the snake scratched into the side.

**If you don’t need it, burn it.**

Jughead brings him a handful of things they don't need anymore from the trailer, old papers and shit like that. It’s a spring cleaning for them, of sorts. The papers go in on top of the booze. The last thing Jughead drops is a black, leather-bound notebook.

“What was that?” asks FP, which is the first proper thing he’s said to his son - they’ve been crowded around this pit in silence like they’re at an altar.

“It's my-” Jughead hesitates, looking unsure. “My diary.”

The ways in which Jughead takes after his mother still impress him - Gladys had been a devout diarist for as long as FP had known her. Fred used to journal, too. (JOURNAL! - not diary, Fred’s insistent adolescent bellow) FP had never managed it, not even in prison. He hated himself enough in his own thoughts, he didn't need to put them down so he could hate himself on paper.

“You don't have to-”

And then, eerily, as if Jughead can read his mind: “I don't need it.”

He lights Jughead’s match from the tip of his, and they drop them in at the same time.  

 

> _Will you raise me up? will you help me down?_
> 
> _Will you get me right out of this godforsaken town?_
> 
> _Will you make it all a little less cold?_
> 
> _I can do that._

 

Maybe they're healed, he thinks- slam a homer, set some shit on fire, that was them, wasn't it? And then bang, boom, you're on the mend. Sealed up against water.

Symbolic things, tiny things, the kind Gladys would have appreciated as a writer. The kind of things that mean _life goes on, life goes up._

The Fourth of July comes around again, and this time, they're ready for it.

Fred has the cooler packed by five-thirty am. Just lunch - snacks and sandwiches for the road, and **FRUIT** , because Fred was a good dad, the kind who bought fruit and made you eat it. FP’s in charge of loading it all. Jughead and Archie are _supposed_ to be getting the fishing stuff together, but mostly they’re play-fighting on the lawn and running around tripping over bags. Fred’s annoyed because they’re getting the dog all excited, and he doesn’t want them to wake up the neighbourhood.

It’s that road trip they never went on - him and Fred, Jughead and Archie, doesn’t matter. By seven they’re crammed into the vehicle - the _shaggin’ wagon 2.0_ , if you will - and Jughead and Archie have split open the pack of red licorice that was supposed to be for after lunch. The smell of it from the backseat is sweet and sickly enough to have him roll the windows down, and for a moment the taste of the soft, early-morning air running past them is something like being reborn.

By seven-fifteen the sun is already up at full heat and they’re all downing water, the ice cubes Fred had conscientiously added to each bottle clinking against each other under the music (driver chooses the music, so it was FP’s prerogative, but he’d differed to Fred’s judgement.) Fred’s stronger still, now, his face fuller and sunshine-bright, new muscles pressing shape into his tanned arms. The sun glitters in the windshield and fills the cab with warmth and for a moment it seems nothing can touch them - not the heat wave, not Riverdale, nothing.

Then the motor gives out.

And the bitter fucking irony of it is, they’re not out of the town yet. They’re some eight hundred fucking metres before the fifty-year-old sign that says RIVERDALE: THE TOWN WITH PEP!!! and the engine just won’t turn over.

He glances in the rearview mirror and sees Archie and Jughead looking up at him, their faces twin expressions of horror and incomprehension. FP wants to laugh incredulously, but he thinks he’ll start crying if he does and never stop. They’re so fucking close to the city line. They’re so fucking close. This town just can’t fucking let them go.

Fred’s expression is the worst of all - he’s smiling in a half-lipped, ironic, incredulous kind of way, the kind of smile that said _what the fuck, eh? imagine that_ , only his eyes are glittering with tears and there’s a mounting panic behind them, a total disbelieving stupefaction like he’s just been unspeakably betrayed, like someone’s thrown a bucket of cold water in his face and just hasn’t processed it yet. FP thinks his face must look the same: half desperate, half manic.

It’s fine, he wants to say, we’ll fix it, but in the meantime they’re stuck behind the town line as it gets hotter and hotter and there’s no way for them to get out. They’re rooted in this place that they’ve never left: here with the hospital and the penitentiary and the bottling plant and the river, and they’ll be here at least until lunch - have to eat their sandwiches dry leaning against the back of the car, use the fucking woods for a bathroom, and yeah, they have their toolbox in the back but what if it’s not enough - what if they have to call a tow truck, or Keller, or someone to pick them up just behind the town line, shuttle them back to Fred’s cul-de-sac to get something to put this heap of shit back together -

The slam of Archie’s passenger-side door interrupts his thoughts. “Archie-” calls Fred, and twists around in his seat to see where he’s gone. FP feels numb. He can see the back of that enormous sign through the trees, the river rushing louder and louder to their left. He’d dumped a body in that river, once. A kid’s body.

Fred seems to understand something, then, and he gets out of the car next, as quick and as purposeful as he’d hit that fastball in the park. FP almost grabs his shirt to hold him back, hating that the faintly maple-smelling river mist was finding its way inside their car, but then he gets it. Realizes where they’re going.

“Jughead, c’mon,” he says, and follows suit, hurries around to the back of the car where Fred and Archie are already balanced against it, lined up to push. Jughead smiles at the sight of it, and it tugs something in FP’s chest, way down deep.

They push the fucking thing. Arms tensed, sweat running down their backs, bodies straining against the blistering metal of the bumper, summer shoes slipping on the crumbling, twig-strewn road. They throw their combined weight against the broken-down van with a drive bordering on mania, and yet FP feels a simultaneous glowing elation as the dead wheels begin to move on the road, almost an urge to laugh. When he looks to his right he sees Fred grinning.

“We should unload some stuff,” gasps Jughead once they’ve moved the van a few feet, because the dead weight of all their belongings is weighing the vehicle down until it’s like pushing a brick wall.

“No time,” breathes Archie, who apparently runs on what FP used to think of as Fred-time - all at once or nothing at all. “Push-”

FP’s stronger now, has bigger arms, a broader chest, can do the brunt of the shoving for all of them - this sweaty, clumsy brood of people he thinks of as family. But it takes all of them to get it even with the sign, the huge fucking wood monstrosity that borders the river, to line the thing up like they’re at the starting line of a race.

 _Almost there_ , he thinks, and feels the thought run through them all like an electric current, _almost there, almost out, almost gone._

He knows it’s an arbitrary border crossing - a blue line on a map they don’t even have with them, one they truthfully might have passed a few feet back by that fallen tree - there was no telling where Riverdale really let out into the bigger, wider world, no marker by the tree-lined side of the road. It was just a line, like Sweetwater was just a river, but it matters. It matters the way Gladys would have understood, the reason you burned what you didn’t need anymore instead of just leaving it behind.

The tears he’d felt rise in him when the engine had first conked out come to his eyes now, and he feels again that absurd mixture of laughing and crying. It’s ridiculous what they’re doing, strenuous, painful, but Archie’s laughing and Jughead’s laughing, and FP’s braced himself around Fred so that their hands are pushing nearly in the same spot and Fred’s back is warm and solid against his front, and he feels alive - really alive - for the first time since he’s been out of prison.

(Jones men were made of fire but Andrews men were made of stone.)

“Now-” grunts Fred and they all push hard, sneakers sliding in the gravel, arms trembling with effort as they walk the van forward the last few feet, force the wheels to turn past the wooden sign, down past the mouth of the river and the tallest of the trees.

Together they push the van over the border and out of town.

  

> _And some days I pray for silence_
> 
> _And some days I pray for soul_
> 
> _Some days I just pray to the god of sex and drums and rock 'n' roll_

 

It’s coming up on nine. Even this early, the sun is a dazzling smokey jewel above the river, burning the soft of their shoulders and the back of their necks. FP is up to his arms in the hood of their van, trying and failing to tighten one last something that doesn’t want to be tightened. Fred’s perched precariously on the front bumper, the sleeves of his t-shirt shoved up, his blue jeans remarkably clean despite the grime. He’s looking out cooly over the mist of the river, the way the sun glitters in the calm water like a thousand little mirrors.

“Fred,” asks FP, breathing oil and grease - “can you pass me that -”

It’s in his hand before he can finish the sentence, because they read each other's minds now, always have. Fred’s fingers are freezing cold and sticky when they brush, and FP raises his head from the guts of the van, bemused and exasperated.

“Are you drinking those already?

Fred laughs and holds one of the four bottles of coke they’d packed for lunch to FP’s mouth so he can drink from it. They’d been ice-cold when they’d made it into the cooler, and the condensation runs down Fred’s arm now in rivers, cooling the skin of FP’s face. Archie’s iPhone is laying on the roof of the car, floating tinny music down to the place where they’re working. 

Archie and Jughead are down by the river, backs to them, seeing how the fishing is a whole two metres outside of town. With the sun this bright FP can see them only in silhouette: two dark shapes against the blue of the sky.

“Better call them back,” says FP.  “I think we're good to go.”


End file.
